Monthly Archives: July 2014

Last night (7/25), the Adobe Creative Cloud desktop app deployed an upgrade. I was minutes away from a presentation, so I wanted to dismiss the update, but there was no option to decline; it was either upgrade or quit. I couldn’t quit, because I wanted to show the features in ACC. The other two speakers had already run the update and seemed to have no issues, so I took a deep breath and ran it. For good measure, I rebooted. To set up for my first topic, I opened a PSD with missing fonts, and received no “missing font” warning, and no offer to go shopping for fonts on Typekit. Photoshop locked up, and I had to force quit.

Unfortunately, I was about to demo that very feature in front of about 200 people. I force-quit, rebooted, then quit and relaunched the desktop app, and Photoshop still wouldn’t show the missing fonts alert (even though the affected type layers sported yellow triangles). I was running out of time.

I sidestepped the issue by showing how to get fonts from Typekit through a browser, and by some miracle, a font actually synced and showed up in my fonts list. I applied it, and I think nobody knew. But I was a bit flustered, and afraid that something else would go awry.

After the session, I futzed around more, with no success; it still wouldn’t trigger the Missing Fonts alert. Finally, more out of aggravation than hope, I wiped out the Photoshop preferences — and that fixed it. Not just in Photoshop, but in all the other apps, too (beats me).

When I got home, I ran the ACC update on the desktop Mac, with the same results; somehow, it warped Photoshop’s connection with Typekit. And when I wiped out the prefs, everything was fixed.

This is under Mac OS 10.9 (Mavericks); anybody else have this experience?

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“That dinner was incredible!”
Really? You couldn’t believe that it was a dinner? “Incredible” means “beyond belief.”
Was it delicious? Was it elegantly presented? Then it was “delicious, and elegantly presented.” Was it as big as a two-story building? Okay, that’s incredible.

Why the escalating superlatives? I think it’s primarily due to a poverty of vocabulary, coupled with simplistic thinking: the speaker wants to describe the dinner in a positive manner, and “incredible” comes easily to mind, because she hears it constantly from her equally lazy peers.

“I washed the dishes.”
“Awesome!”
“Awesome” would be if Jimi Hendrix came back to life, right here in front of me. Washing dishes is something that, well, I thought you were going to do last week.

“That movie was HILARIOUS!” Not really; it’s a bunch of stoners trying to find a car/hamburger stand/sex tape, with dialogue generated by shredding old Jim Carrey scripts and reassembling them with a glue gun.

At the opposite end of the superlative spectrum, there’s “no problem.”
“Thanks for bringing our meals while they’re still lukewarm.”
“No problem.”
Is there usually a problem? Is it rare that you deliver meals in a timely manner to diners?
Instead of “no problem,” say something with some conscious thought and intent behind it, such as “my pleasure.”

But there’s something else, too—cadence. I think a love of accentual-syllabic verse runs deep in us, at least in the Western linguistic tradition (that arcane phrase will make sense in a second; hang in there). From Shakespeare to Hallmark cards, there’s a certain vocal rhythm we adopt: da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM. “The DINner was NICE” doesn’t quite have it. “The DINner WAS inCREDuhBULL!” See what I mean?

I think the same urge for rhythm, coupled with the desire to add some extra verbal oomph, prompts the pointless use of profanity: “SHE’S a FRAKking ID-iot.” But you can have so much more fun with language if you exploit rich vocabulary. We’re masters of elaborate invective here in the South: “Bless her little heart, she probably pre-heats the microwave.”

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A client sent me an InDesign file, complaining that the placed Illustrator EPS file within would not display at High Quality Display. He assured me that the file was up to date.

My first move, of course, was to resave the Illustrator file as a native AI file. Hmmmm…no luck.

Both the InDesign file and the Illustrator file are large—72 x 48 inches. The Illustrator file is not complex—no effects, no symbols, no patterns. At Fit Page in Window, InDesign is displaying the page at 14% magnification. Even when High Quality Display is invoked, the Illustrator file looks ratty. However, once I zoom in to 50%, all is well.

At first, I thought this was just InDesign thinking, “why bother to render detail when you’re zoomed out so far?” But I made another discovery.

A smaller Illustrator file (smaller in terms of dimensions) displays fine at any magnification. Here’s a comparison:

The top file is 18 inches wide, 1.2MB, placed at 100% in a 20×20 InDesign file. The bottom file is 2.5 inches wide, 1.1MB, placed at 800%. So it’s not a matter of file size; it’s a matter of dimensions, apparently.

Output is fine—only the display in InDesign is questionable, and only when you’re zoomed out (the particular zoom level varies according to the dimensions of the InDesign file). Zoom in sufficiently, and you’ll see the real story. And if you’re still in doubt, make a PDF. If the PDF looks good, that’s all that counts.